Work Text:
How to Make Pyttipanna
~or~
Five Times Gabriel Landeskog Got the Recipe Wrong
and One Time It Turned Out Right
August 2011
How can he not find the baking soda? He hesitates in the aisle without even a cart to lean purposefully against, his eyes scanning the terribly unfamiliar layout. He shudders inwardly—what he wouldn’t give for a Wal-Mart. He doesn’t even care if they destroy the economy or whatever; at least they put their baking goods in the same aisle.
As opposed to putting the flour next to—yeah, that’s a box of soap he’s feigning interest in as a shop employee passes him. He lurches to a nearby shelf to get out of her way and keeps his eyes firmly on the packaging. Not that he couldn’t ask for help; his Swedish is perfectly fine, thank you, even if he doesn’t get to use it nearly enough, but he shouldn’t have to ask for directions in his hometown grocery store.
He instinctively murmurs, “I’m sorry about that”—in English—to the stocker he almost tripped over and is immediately annoyed with himself. Speaking English anywhere outside North America feels too much like a political statement, one he doesn’t care to make, and it’s a shock to find himself doing it without even thinking about it.
He wanders a bit more, feeling his frustration rise as a blush in his cheeks. A matronly woman catches his eye and offers a sympathetic smile. He exhales hard through his nose and turns on his heel before she can say anything helpful.
He loves Beatrice, but she can buy her own baking soda.
He puts the cinnamon and the powdered sugar on the conveyer belt, turning the barcodes to face the scanner to make it easier for the cashier, and responds to her greeting mechanically.
“Are you American?” she asks, and he looks up from his wallet, surprised more than anything. She smiles at him. “Your Swedish accent is very good.”
“…Canadian,” he says, snatching the sugar up almost as fast as she sets it down.
He shoves the groceries in his messenger bag and takes the train to Filip’s mom’s apartment. At first, he looks out the window, but it’s boring; Stockholm’s the same as it ever was. He puts headphones on and drowns out the city with some Swedish House Mafia, picking at his Livestrong bracelet. He’s got a tan line from it now.
His stop is only fifteen minutes away; another five minutes and he’s inside, setting down his bag and allowing himself to be chivvied into the living room. Soon he’s settled in front of the TV with a bowl of pretzels he won’t eat and his stockinged feet tucked into the couch cushions. The food’s great, the conversation is interesting (and not entirely about hockey), and his friends are here. Gabe’s bored.
Simon’s reenacting Linda Pritchard’s Melodifestivalen song from this spring, which Gabe did not see. He gathers from Simon’s performance that it involved a lot of leg-splaying and arm-tossing.
“She’s too old for you, though,” Filip points out. He knocks Simon’s hand out of the way so he can get up.
Simon flops down in his seat. “Red hair covers over a multitude of sins, man.” He elbows Gabe. “Right?”
Gabe isn’t sure what to say. His Big Gay Freakout happened in Kitchener, and he hasn’t really told any of his Swedish friends yet. It seems like a mood-killer or whatever.
“Gabbe likes blonds, dumbshit,” Filip calls from the kitchen. He emerges and tosses Simon and Gabe cans of beer.
Gabe laughs a little, like, yeah, because that’s at least not a lie, and decides it’s okay to have one beer. At least it’s legal here. He rolls his eyes at the entire North American continent.
Filip and Simon start shoving each other over who owns the rights to the left side of the couch, and Gabe ignores them; his phone buzzes against his thigh, so he pulls it out of his pocket. It’s a text from Skinner. Gabe immediately feels guilty for feeling like he’s been rescued. He smiles at the tortured spelling: when u comin back 2 cnda? cant wait 2 skate crcles round u
He texts back: You’re good at those. It’s harder with pads and a stick, though.
f you, @ least i look gud-bet u coulnt do a lyback spin if ur lif depnded on it
He laughs and Filip nudges him. “What’s going on?”
“One of my roommates from Ontario—Jeff Skinner. He was just...” He trails off; his friends have those expectant and slightly buzzed looks that say they’re just waiting for a story to laugh at. “You know one time me and Skinny were in a hotel and at midnight we got a craving for—I don’t even remember, but we snuck out and,” he laughs as he remembers, “it was like Mission Impossible. We made our way to the convenience store in the dead of night—we had to sneak back in through the service door.”
Filip and Simon look at him like they’re waiting for something more.
“It was really funny,” Gabe assures them.
“Sounds like it, man.” Filip bumps their knees together and grabs the remote from Simon, who has started shaking it because he can’t get it to work. There’s a soccer game on, and Gabe realizes he doesn’t even know who’s good anymore.
His smile fades a bit; he’s never really been a good storyteller. He turns back to his phone and types: Remember that midnight trip to the 7-11? We should do that again sometime.
mite be a whil-nc and co r real far awy comes the reply, and then: ha! Eric sez i cn go w/ him instead
Gabe suddenly remembers what it was that they’d gone out for—cookie dough ice cream—and tamps down on the instant craving. His new coach will kill him if he turns up to training camp out of shape.
October 2011
Gabe’s doing well with the team on the ice, but he’s not sure about off it. He and Factor and Dutchie have played video games a couple of times, and nothing bad happened except for Factor handing their asses to them at CoD, but nothing really clicked, either. Both Factor and Dutchie are well behaved, especially Dutchie, whose mouth is as squeaky-clean as a 1950s TV show. That’s not a bad thing, but it feels weird—in Kitchener, he was the goody-two-shoes. Gabe chats with them at practice, laughs at their jokes, and never tells them about the Swedish flag he keeps hanging over his bed.
He guesses deep friendships don’t always drop into your lap immediately, but he and Skinny had gotten along pretty well right away, and honestly, he’d kind of hoped. It sucks, moving all the time and having to make new friends constantly. Maybe it’s because Factor and Dutchie don’t need friends as badly as he does; they’ve been in Denver for two years already, and they know everyone.
Sometimes at practice, he hangs back and watches his teammates, especially the ones who have been playing together for years. He likes watching. They communicate without having to speak, at least not in full sentences, and Gabe’s jealous; it’s not like it was at first, but sometimes having to speak English is still exhausting. They work as a team in so many ways, even in the locker room or on the bus. Gabe would like to be a part of that, knows he has to become a part of it if he wants to stay here and help the team win. But it’s not something you do; it’s something that happens to you. He has to wait.
Hejduk’s a good captain; he treats everyone politely and is careful to notice and point out what everyone does best. Other people always seem encouraged after he talks to them. He says helpful things to Gabe, but it doesn’t feel like anything special, and Gabe wonders why it doesn’t work on him. Maybe they just don’t know each other well enough yet. Gabe wishes they were friends, although he’s not sure whether people who are seventeen years different in age can really be friends. Hejduk’s not having a good year, and he could probably use the kind of encouragement he gives to everyone else.
Erik Johnson is assigned to be Gabe’s road-trip roommate—his “babysitter,” Erik jokes—and Gabe likes him okay. Erik’s nice to Gabe even though he doesn’t have to be, always making a point of looking him in the eye when they speak, and he’s not as completely full of bullshit as some of the other guys. He’s respectful about how he treats Gabe, like they’re strangers and he’s not sure how far it’s okay to go with the teasing. Erik is 23 and has lots of friends on the team and a girlfriend he calls all the time, and he doesn’t sleep well if Gabe’s watching TV. He didn’t say so, but Gabe noticed. It’d be more fun to room with Factor, even if he doesn’t know when to quit joking sometimes. Still, he supposes that’s the point—Erik’s supposed to be a mature role model or something.
The evening after Gabe scores his first NHL goal—not a pretty one, but it still counts—a bunch of them go out to dinner at an Italian place. It’s not cold yet, but it’s starting to cool down, especially at night. Gabe pushes his limp side salad around his plate and thinks about the root vegetables his grandma makes for Sunday dinners at home. He thinks about his mom’s meatballs and her pyttipanna. His mom is the best cook. She’s a chef and a cooking instructor, actually, but it’s not something she gets tired of and refuses to bring home with her. The food on their table was always beautiful and satisfying—Gabe and Beatrice and Adam were spoiled that way.
Gabe’s an okay cook, too. Learning to cook was his official goal for last year when he was in Kitchener, and he’s conscientious about goals. It was a good one to have—he missed his mom and figured learning to cook would help him stop feeling lonely. Also, it’s an important life skill. Gabe likes to know that he could take care of himself if he had to, even though it’s a little bit weird of him. Ramona said she’d be happy to make food for him, but he wanted to do it.
This year’s goal was supposed to be learning to do household chores, but it kind of got interrupted by, well. Being in the NHL. He can probably still work on it—it won’t be the same as at the Mitchells’, but he can’t imagine his new billet family saying no to extra help around the house.
Anyway, even though he knows he could manage to roast some vegetables, his hankering is going to go unfulfilled. He hasn’t had time to drive around looking for rutabagas in any of the stores here. And he’d never be able to make pyttipanna that tasted like his mom’s, since he’s pretty sure it has her homemade blood sausage in it. Store-bought versions aren’t even close—okay, so the only store that sells pyttipanna around here is Ikea, and it’s this gross frozen version that Gabe’s ashamed to say he attempted to eat.
He looks up when he realizes he’s lost track of the conversation and notices Erik frowning at him. He lifts his eyebrow.
Erik eyes Gabe’s plate. “You always skip your vegetables?”
“No,” Gabe says too quickly to stop himself from sounding defensive. “I just… They put on too much dressing.”
“Next time ask for it on the side,” Erik suggests. He looks pleased to have advice to share. “It’s not too hard to eat right; you just have to pay attention. Now that you’re living on your own and don’t have Mommy to feed you.” He nudges Gabe’s ribs like this is hilarious.
Gabe’s embarrassed. He’s been in charge of himself for two years now, and he knows how to eat, thanks. Maybe he looks like a kid—maybe he’s supposed to be a kid right now—but he isn’t a kid. He sort of skipped that part.
December 2011
It’s the 26th, and the Avalanche are in the Twin Cities. They didn’t have to play on the holiday itself, thank god, so the guys that had family in Denver got to hang out with their kids. Hejduk has twin boys that must be about seven or eight right now. They’re the cutest thing, and they remind Gabe of himself and Beatrice at that age. They have a twin language that’s really just English with some of the sounds inverted; it’d be easy to figure out how to translate from it, but Gabe doesn’t try, out of respect.
But anyway, they’re in Minnesota now, in some hotel that looks like every other hotel they stay in. They shouldn’t stay up too late because they have to play the Jets tomorrow night, but Erik’s in a good mood since they won. They’ve been doing well at home, but playing like crap on the road; if they’d lost, it would’ve been their tenth away loss in a row. Even just thinking about it makes Gabe’s teeth grind in frustration. But they won tonight, and Gabe had a goal and was named first star. Erik’s eyes are bright; he’s talking faster than usual, and he moves around the room like he’s restless.
Gabe knows he should be getting ready for bed, but to be honest, he’s got just as much energy as Erik. He gets as far as taking off his jacket and tie before jumping on his bed and manically pushing remote buttons to see what’s on.
Erik leans against the desk, messing around with the room service menu and talking nonstop. His cheeks are flushed, and his hands are animated. Gabe’s intrigued, because Erik’s usually more subdued than this, but he looks happy. He’s talking about Christmas dinner at his girlfriend’s house, and how he’s glad that there was snow in Denver this year because sometimes there wasn’t in St. Louis and Erik kind of missed it. And now there isn’t even snow in Minneapolis because of record highs, which is a crime against his childhood. Gabe wonders why he isn’t hanging out with his parents tonight—isn’t Bloomington, like, five minutes away?—and Erik explains that they’re out of town visiting his sister. Then he asks, “What’d you do for the holiday?”
“Not much,” Gabe admits. He did call his mom, though, and then his dad. He’d opened some presents from his billet parents and brothers. They bought him Jean Paul Gaultier cologne; Gabe wears it every day—as a kid, he’d always thought about it as being the smell of a Real Man. But somehow seeing it with a bow on it makes him miss his dad like a punch in nose. His billet brothers moved on to stories of past Christmases after that, but Gabe made himself scarce because it seemed like a family thing.
“Aww, did someone tell you Santa isn’t real?” Erik pouts his lower lip in mock indignation.
“No, shut up. It’s not like we’ve had much downtime to do anything.” Truthfully, Gabe thinks a Christmas without his family and friends is just sad. Or maybe it’s that he couldn’t do Christmas like home, and maybe that’s worse.
Erik has moved on to being mock-scandalized. “That won’t do, Whitey,” he says, tossing the menu down on the desk. Gabe makes a show of bristling at the nickname. “You can’t not have Christmas. We should have a real Christmas now! A real Swedish Christmas.” Erik looks at Gabe expectantly.
Gabe doesn’t really know what a Swedish Christmas is supposed to be. Or maybe Erik is looking for the American version of a Swedish Christmas. Gabe has the cruel thought that he could say anything and Erik wouldn’t know differently, but he’s really not like that.
“Well,” he says, glancing out the window at the bare parking lot. The pavement is orange in the streetlights; the leafless trees are gangly and too obvious with no snow to cover them. “Usually my family goes to church…”
It’s eleven-thirty on a Monday night, and there won’t be services anywhere, but Erik laughs. “Cool, I know where we can go.”
Of course Erik knows stuff. He grew up here. Gabe grabs his wallet and key card and starts to walk out the door—it was fifty degrees at noon today, and Gabe’s not sure exactly what that translates to in Celsius, except that it’s too warm for December. But Erik grabs their coats out of the pile of stuff they’ve thrown on the floor. He hands Gabe’s to him. “Trust me.”
Nobody stops them leaving the hotel. The streets outside are crisp and resonant, missing that familiar, snow-muffled silence that makes winter so peaceful and cozy, but it is too cold to walk around in just shirtsleeves, and Gabe’s glad he has his jacket.
They walk several blocks to this huge, old Lutheran church. Gabe is sure the doors will be locked, but they aren’t, and the lights are on. There’s nobody inside, but there’s music playing over the sound system. Erik knees Gabe into a pew and they sit there looking soberly at the cross for a minute until Gabe starts to giggle. They elbow each other a couple of times until they realize where they are and settle down. Erik slouches down into his coat and looks thoughtful; Gabe leans his elbows on the pew in front of him and starts mumbling along with the music. Christmas hymns have the same tunes everywhere.
Erik looks at him consideringly. “Whitey,” he says in a very serious tone, “you are an awful singer.”
Gabe makes a face at him, leans closer, and sings louder. Erik shoves at him without any real intent to move him, and after a while he gives up laughing and starts singing along with Gabe in English. He doesn’t know all the words to “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming”, and his substitutions are ridiculous. Eventually they’re both cackling so much they can’t smother it, and they stumble back out into the cold air.
“What next?” Erik wants to know, and the first thing that Gabe thinks of is food. They end up at Taco Bell because it’s the only place they can find open this late and get Crunchwrap Supremes because, Erik says, that’s the closest thing to a Christmas ham they’ve got. They make these gruesome yule goats out of straws and chewing gum and have battles with them. Gabe’s goat defeats Erik’s and sends it skittering across the floor. His celly earns the obvious disapproval of the other three people in the restaurant, and they decide it’s time to head back.
They grab some insanely overpriced stuff at a gas station on the way back with plans to make pepparkakor in their hotel room’s microwave. Erik tells Gabe about the time he and his sister drove the snowmobile off the back deck and got stuck in a tree. Gabe tells him about the last time he had pepparkakor. It was the last Christmas he spent at home, when he was sixteen and his parents were still together; they’d managed to keep the peace for the entire holiday and—Gabe realizes now—had gone out of their way to do as many family-type, nostalgia-building things as possible.
He appreciates the sacrifice. The months after that were full of arguing, mostly about whether or not Gabe would be allowed to go to Canada, and while he was unpacking his bags in Kitchener, they were talking to their lawyers about getting a divorce. But hockey is the same everywhere, so at least there was that.
Trying to make cookies in the microwave is an abysmal idea, and it’s even worse in practice. Somehow the cookies turn out underdone and burnt both. Gabe knows it’s actually funny, but he’s still disappointed and it shows.
Erik bites into one and ruffles Gabe’s hair. “Aww, it’s okay, Whitey, it doesn’t matter.”
Gabe pulls his shoulders to his ears; maybe it shouldn’t matter, but it does. Erik’s been really great, though. Gabe doesn’t want to complain. But yeah. Pepparkakor. Christmas.
And okay, Gabe knows that it’s okay that he likes boys. His mom and his dad don’t even care, and he probably wouldn’t lose his job if anyone found out, but still. It’s not very smart to have a crush on someone you work with. He’ll get over it.
March 2012
Gabe’s going back to Stockholm in a couple of months, and he knows it’s ludicrous that he can’t wait, but he just can’t. His Twitter followers are giving him shit for tweeting in Swedish, which, seriously? It’s not like it’s his native tongue or anything. A few of them—teenaged girls, mostly—have tried to tweet him back in Swedish and clearly used Google Translate. It’s cute, but it makes him miss being able to talk to people who can conjugate their verbs correctly.
A few weeks ago, his grandfather, the one he’s named after, died. He couldn’t go home for the funeral.
He calls up Beatrice and leaves a “Hey twin sister, how are you doing?” message, fiddles with the cap of his hair gel, plays with his bracelet, and then gives in. It’s lame, it’s ridiculous, it’s a caricature of reality—he knows all this—but he heads for Ikea anyway. They have meatballs there. And lingonberry everything.
Ikea smells like apple pie and new plastic. To be honest, it’s not really like Sweden at all, but it’s almost good enough for pretending.
He gets a text from Factor demanding to know his whereabouts and confesses that he’s at the Magical Swedish Furniture Store with a LOL at himself. Factor roundly mocks him and then tells him to wait before he orders anything. He’s been driving Dutchie around to do errands, since Dutchie messed up his ankle and misplaced his driver’s license. They’re in the area, and they’re hungry.
The three of them sit at a table where they can watch middle-class housewives drop their kids off at the ball pit before shopping for post-modern lampshades or whatever. Factor announces that Gabe is going to give him and Dutchie Swedish food lessons, and Gabe is weirdly pleased and kind of excited. He picks out a couple of things that he knows will be challenging and some other stuff that he knows they’ll like. They proceed to praise everything that tastes like sugar and express their dismay at anything with fish in it.
Gabe laughs at Factor’s face when he tries the dill-cured salmon. “Even babies eat this stuff, you wuss.”
Factor shoves at him and says, “Whatever, freak. You’re used to eating weird.”
Gabe rolls his eyes, but Dutchie nods. “Yeah, everything Landy eats is weird. Have you seen him with cereal?”
“What’s weird about how I eat cereal?” Gabe protests, but he’s drowned out by Factor asking basically the same question but with more delight than indignation.
“He puts the milk in first,” Dutchie explains, and Factor makes a face.
“Why?” he asks Gabe.
Gabe frowns at them. Dutchie’s given him crap about this before, but then Dutchie’s not really the best yardstick for normal. “Uh… I don’t know? Doesn’t everyone?”
“No,” they assure him. They seem very firmly convinced of this. “Is it like a Swedish thing?”
He thinks about it a minute and realizes he doesn’t know, but Factor has moved on to enthusiastically appreciating the MILFs at the play center. He’s probably just doing it so he can laugh when Dutchie launches into a scolding tirade about respecting women, but it makes Gabe self-conscious all over again. He’s been trying to play along for a while, but he’s terrible at it. A few weeks ago, he idiotically tweeted about Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Edition. He tried to make it sound ironic and cool but realizes now that it was mostly just awkward. He can’t take it down, though, because people would notice. People retweeted it and stuff. Although really just the retweeting isn’t so bad—sometimes they respond and, like, make sex jokes at him, which is extremely embarrassing.
A lot of people follow him on Twitter—a lot of people that he doesn’t know. Okay, most of them are the aforementioned teenage girls who are distressingly open about the fact that they think he’s hot, but some of them are journalists, too. And bloggers. And his mom. He cringes just thinking about his mom reading what he said about bathing suits. But if he doesn’t talk about girls, people might notice that he talks too much about Erik. Erik might notice.
Being kind of semi-famous sucks.
They play rock-paper-scissors to see who pays the bill, and Factor loses. He whines dramatically about them making him pay now that he’s an RFA and technically kind of unemployed—which, whatever, so is Dutchie. Dutchie waffles, but Gabe tells Factor to man up. Factor makes a face at him but pays, obviously.
They leave to go buy lumber or something and Gabe figures he’d probably better head out, too. He drags his feet.
Ikea doesn’t sell Marabou anymore for some reason, so he buys a disappointingly-not-Marabou, Ikea-branded chocolate bar and eats the entire thing in his car. He can do what he wants.
May 2012
Despite the fact that his plane got in late and his mom urged him to sleep in, Gabe wakes up at five am. Jet lag, he supposes. He watches Adam and Beatrice eat breakfast. Neither of them pours milk before the cereal. In fact, Beatrice doesn’t have milk with her cereal anymore, apparently. She mixes it with yogurt instead, and he has to head off her rant about the health benefits of live cultures with an “Oh yeah, I was reading about that somewhere—how’s school?”
He’s here for three weeks to eat ice cream and do nothing. He’s supposed to be enjoying the break—but he’s bored already, itching to be back in Colorado with a stick in his hands and skates on his feet.
He goes into his room, calls his dad, and asks if he can come over tomorrow and maybe use his workout equipment. His dad listens to every one of Gabe’s games over the internet, and Beatrice says he wears Gabe’s sweater every time, too, which is a little bit sentimental but kind of warms Gabe’s heart anyway, but it’s been a long time since they’ve gotten to spend any time together.
His dad’s been making dumb jokes about how Gabe’s going to win the Calder, which Gabe wishes he wouldn’t do. It’s not just that he’s going to jinx it, even though he is. It’s that it’s embarrassing. The Calder is a big deal, but it doesn’t make Gabe a big deal. He hopes nobody in Colorado thinks he’s conceited—which is kind of a conceited thing to think. Probably anybody who knows him well would know that he’s not the conceited type, but maybe they don’t know him that well yet. It’s been almost a whole year, but, it’s like, he still doesn’t know whether he can fully relax around them yet. He doesn’t even know whether he knows how to relax around them. It seemed like things were smoother when he was in Kitchener. At least he knew who he was.
When he hangs up, he turns on the TV; Friends is on. He’s seen this episode before, obviously—even if he didn’t own the entire show on DVD, he’s not a caveman, he has Netflix—but that’s not the point. It’s subtitled in Swedish, and he doesn’t even look at the words, just listens to the American voices. Matthew Perry looks nothing like Erik, but his character tells all these self-deprecating, sarcastic jokes, so he ends up reminding Gabe of Erik anyway, which, sigh. (And it’s not because Gabe identifies with Monica—shut up—it’s an objective assessment.)
His mom’s standing in the doorway. He turns down the volume and sits up.
“What’s wrong?” She sits next to him on the bed and presses her shoulder against his. “I can’t remember the last time you were here and didn’t want to spend all your time in the living room with your brother and sister.”
Gabe laughs humorlessly. “I think I’m homesick.”
His mom puts her arm around him and squeezes. He can tell that she doesn’t know exactly what to say, so he starts to apologize, but she shakes her head and smiles. “It’s okay, honey. I know that when you left, I… didn’t want you to go. But I’m glad that you’re doing what you love, and I’m glad you feel at home there. I’d been worried that you weren’t fitting in.”
“I think,” he says, unwilling to disappoint her, “that I’m starting to?”
“You’re a good kid,” she says, squeezing him one more time before getting up. “I know what will make you feel better. Homemade pyttipanna, right?”
Gabe feels a warm swell of nostalgia and smiles at her. He remembers eating that dish from the solid kitchen table—the flavors comfortingly crisp. His forehead creases as he tries to remember when he’s last eaten it. It must have been years ago. His mouth waters just thinking about it. Like, literally, not even as a figure of speech.
It’s still an hour or two before lunch, and Gabe messes around on Twitter while his mom cooks, trying to figure out who he wants to draft for his fantasy football team. Erik knows so much better who’d be good to pick, but he’s got his own team, and he’s not sharing secrets. The time goes faster than he’d expected, and soon everyone sits down together, and his mom passes him a plate of pyttipanna with pickled beets and eggs.
As he brings a forkful to his mouth, the smell brings back the days when his mom and dad still ate at the same table. It brings back skinned knees and runny noses, screams of laughter, and his dad’s hand on his back, teaching him how to play hockey. Always hockey. It’s like his childhood on a fork.
But the taste is off. Too acidic, too sharp, it melts in his mouth and leaves a bitter aftertaste. Shocked, he forces a smile, letting the emotions he’d expected wash over his face. He swallows hard like something is stuck in his throat. “Just like always, Mamma.”
She nods, looking pleased. “I know what my boy likes.”
September 2012
Gabe’s mom is the first person he calls after he leaves the office. Being the youngest team captain in the NHL—ever—is the sort of thing he’d rather have his parents hear from his own mouth. He was surprised that Hejduk is resigning, and he’s also kind of surprised the office picked him as a replacement instead of Dutchie or Erik or Stastny or any of the other young players. Honestly, there are a billion people they could have chosen over him, and he’s not sure why he was the one.
He hopes he’ll do as good a job as Hejduk, who, awkwardly, will still be around even though he’s not captain anymore. Hejduk said he felt uncomfortable being captain while playing on the fourth line and then made some jokes about getting too old to play. He meant it to be lighthearted, but it made Gabe’s cheeks heat up with sympathy. Hejduk’ll be right there to see if Gabe messes up. But he’ll also be there to help out—he’s being made assistant captain—and that’s what Gabe tries to focus on, the positive side. He’s always been responsible, and he’ll be good at this.
He texts Factor and Dutchie and Erik to tell them—he’s pretty sure he can call them “friends” at this point, and friends are people who shouldn’t hear this stuff from TSN—and Factor immediately calls him to congratulate him. “Dude, you’re perfect for this,” he says. “Maybe I don’t want to re-up with you guys after all”—and then launches into a barrage of complaints about how Gabe’s going to be a slave driver who yells at the team all the time and bag skates them at every practice until their legs turn into actual jelly and they barf all over the ice. Gabe laughs, stupidly pleased. Factor doesn’t sound jealous at all, and now that Gabe thinks about it, he doesn’t know why he’d expected him to. Clearly Gabe’s insecurities were just coloring his perception or something.
The responses from Dutchie and Erik are just as warm, and when he Skypes Skinny to talk about it later, he beams so wide his face looks like it’s going to split and Gabe practically has to look away to escape the blindingness of it. He chirps him about his dumb smile, and Skinny scowls and makes fun of Gabe for being enormously popular with the 12-and-under set, to which Gabe responds, “I didn’t know kids your age liked boys yet”—so basically everything’s exactly like it should be.
The Pro Summit Camp takes up all of his brainpower for the next week or so, but when it’s over, he and Dutchie have a couple of days before they have to be in New York for the PA meeting. They check on the apartment Dutchie left empty all summer, drop off Gabe’s bag at his billet, then go bowling and stay up late watching movies and talking about them. Dutchie has a lot to say about the visual composition of the films, and Gabe suddenly realizes that Dutchie’s really smart. He feels like he should’ve known that already.
When he wakes up at one o’clock the next afternoon, he has a bunch of text messages. Erik says he’s in town and they should hang out before they all head to NYC, and Dutchie says he and Factor are coming over with beer.
Dutchie’s been trying to act sophisticated, but it’s obvious that he’s really excited about being able to drink now. He’s been buying beer for everyone since January. He keeps trying to get Gabe into this pretentious microbrew that Gabe and Skinny tried once in Kitchener; Gabe remembers it being terrible, but Dutchie’s all, “This stuff is amazing, you should give it another chance”, and he thinks, why not? He checks with his billet dad, texts Dutchie back telling him to get the stupid microbrew and some cookie dough ice cream, and calls his mom.
“Mamma,” he says, “I want to make pyttipanna for my friends, but I don’t know if I can do it without your sausage. Is there—”
She cuts him off with a thoughtful sound. “Pyttipanna?” she asks. “You don’t have to use sausage. I make it differently every time.”
Gabe pauses and readjusts the phone tucked under his ear. “What? Really?”
“Yes, didn’t you notice? You just throw in whatever you have. It’s a cooking adventure. Sometimes it’s delicious, and sometimes it isn’t—but you kind of learn as you go what will be good and what won’t be. A couple of times, it was so bad I had to throw it away and get takeaway.” She laughs. “But those leftovers were going to be disgusting no matter what I did with them.”
“Oh,” he says, and she tells him the basics: cut up potatoes and onions and meat, then fry them—it’s absurdly easy. He pokes around in the kitchen and realizes that he won’t even have to go to the store. There’s stuff in the fridge that will work already, including a bunch of carrots that needs to get eaten today. His billet dad checks in on him before he heads out to the boys’ soccer game, and Gabe tells him to have a good time and that he doesn’t need anything from the store, but thank you for offering.
By the time Dutchie and Factor show up with the beer and the ice cream and a hummus-and-pita tray from Whole Foods, because Factor thinks he’s responsible for Dutchie and Gabe’s diet or something, Gabe has plates set out and the pyttipanna just finishing up. Erik’s two minutes behind them but light-years more polite, and he comes immediately into the kitchen to see if he can help with anything.
“Okay, Whitey, whatever that is smells amazing,” he says, poking his nose into the kitchen and zeroing in on the stove. He’s totally invading Gabe’s personal space, which is awesome.
When they spread out in the TV room and eat, his friends praise the food so much that Gabe is embarrassed and tells them that his mom is the creative one.
“I love your mom,” Factor says, shoveling more onto his plate. “Is she single?” Gabe makes the traditional horrified expression and the “gross, that’s my mom” protest, but Factor is like, “Seriously, this is the best food. I love this.”
Gabe grins. “We have something in common, then.”
“We already had something in common.” Factor looks at Gabe like he’s the dumbest person in the world. “We play together.”
“And you both love the Disney Channel,” Erik adds, copying Factor with exaggerated expression and intonation. Dutchie snickers. Factor thoughtfully confiscates Erik’s beer and sets it on the coffee table before kicking him in the thigh.
Gabe tumbles to Erik’s rescue with a well-aimed grab for Factor’s ankle. Factor actually squeals, which makes Gabe and Erik and Dutchie laugh so hard that they can’t even sit up anymore, and the four of them end up in a wheezing pile on the couch with a temporary truce. Gabe’s suddenly really happy, because finally, at least for today, everything’s perfect—the food and the company and just everything.
Even Dutchie’s godawful beer.